Why the river?

wrote:
Water or another airport...it is not important, everybody
survived...including my uncle...

Air travel has become very safe because each accident has been studied
with resulting recommendations on how to improve aircraft, procedures etc.

Such an easy ditching with aircraft remaining intact is very rare. This
information gathered from this may help develop simulator software to
simulate water ditching more accurately and this help train pilots for
this.

NTSB will also find out what helped and what didn't help in the A320 and
this will give important clues to the airframe and engine makers on how
to improve their aircraft.

The FAA *might* update their certification requirements for engines's
ability to survive bird ingestion.

This is a significant accident despite loss of life being at 0.

On Jan 17, 9:33*pm, Cyrus Afzali wrote:
On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:51:14 -0800 (PST), wrote:
It makes me wonder. With so many airports just seconds away, the pilot
chooses water. Can't wait to hear why.

Seconds? You've got to be kidding me? The only airport that was a
legitimate option at that location is a general aviation airport in
Teterboro, N.J. It handles business jet traffic, but not commercial.

LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are all both more than seconds away for a
plane that has no power. Really, this isn't that hard.

I did a little measuring and calculating:

Glide ratio for the A320: 17:1
Altitude: 3000'
Maximum distance without engines: 3000 X 17 / 5280 = 9.7 miles
(does not take into account the loss of altitude when making turns)
distance to Teterboro: 9 miles (130 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to LaGuardia: 3.5 miles (50 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to JFK: 13 miles (190 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to where it landed: 7 miles

3000' doesn't get you as far as I would have expected. If they had
attempted Teterboro, they would have ended up in some industrial
building before the runway. JFK would be worse, but what about
LaGuardia? It's only half as far as where they chose.

wrote in message
...
On Jan 17, 9:33 pm, Cyrus Afzali wrote:
On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:51:14 -0800 (PST), wrote:
It makes me wonder. With so many airports just seconds away, the pilot
chooses water. Can't wait to hear why.

Seconds? You've got to be kidding me? The only airport that was a
legitimate option at that location is a general aviation airport in
Teterboro, N.J. It handles business jet traffic, but not commercial.

LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are all both more than seconds away for a
plane that has no power. Really, this isn't that hard.

I did a little measuring and calculating:

Glide ratio for the A320: 17:1
Altitude: 3000'
Maximum distance without engines: 3000 X 17 / 5280 = 9.7 miles
(does not take into account the loss of altitude when making turns)
distance to Teterboro: 9 miles (130 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to LaGuardia: 3.5 miles (50 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to JFK: 13 miles (190 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to where it landed: 7 miles

3000' doesn't get you as far as I would have expected. If they had
attempted Teterboro, they would have ended up in some industrial
building before the runway. JFK would be worse, but what about
LaGuardia? It's only half as far as where they chose.

****ING armchair quarterbacks. FOAD, eh?

wrote:

distance to LaGuardia: 3.5 miles (50 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to JFK: 13 miles (190 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to where it landed: 7 miles

The NTSB will surely look into this. I heard a tidbit that the captain
was affraid to set a path over populated areas beause of fear he would
crash on buildings.

The big question is whether it would have been operationally possible to
get the plane to do a 360 and head back to the runway it had taken off
from, and have airport clear the path in time for the plane to land
there without a collision with another aircraft. Remember that there
were likely other planes that had already taken off behind that US Air
one, so those would have had to veer off in the right direction to let
the US Air do its 360 turn.

Doing a sharp 360 would have probably costed the aircraft much altitude
and airspeed. Doing a wide 360 would have taken much more time and
forced the plane to travel far more distance and probably resulted in as
much loss of altitude.


If the pilots were thinking about a standard approach to LGA, then I
suspect the plane wouldn't have had anywhere near enough altitude to
circle NYC and approach the runway normally used for landings.

One must not forget that this plane was laden with fuel, having just
taken off. Landing in a built up area would have created quite the fireball.

We'l have to wait for the NTSB report to find out if they might have
been any other viable landing places or not, and whether they crew's gut
was right or wring in estimating the Hudson was the only place they
could go.

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:02:26 -0800 (PST), wrote:

On Jan 17, 9:33*pm, Cyrus Afzali wrote:
On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:51:14 -0800 (PST), wrote:
It makes me wonder. With so many airports just seconds away, the pilot
chooses water. Can't wait to hear why.

Seconds? You've got to be kidding me? The only airport that was a
legitimate option at that location is a general aviation airport in
Teterboro, N.J. It handles business jet traffic, but not commercial.

LaGuardia, Newark and JFK are all both more than seconds away for a
plane that has no power. Really, this isn't that hard.

I did a little measuring and calculating:

Glide ratio for the A320: 17:1
Altitude: 3000'
Maximum distance without engines: 3000 X 17 / 5280 = 9.7 miles
(does not take into account the loss of altitude when making turns)
distance to Teterboro: 9 miles (130 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to LaGuardia: 3.5 miles (50 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to JFK: 13 miles (190 seconds away @ 250mph)
distance to where it landed: 7 miles

3000' doesn't get you as far as I would have expected. If they had
attempted Teterboro, they would have ended up in some industrial
building before the runway. JFK would be worse, but what about
LaGuardia? It's only half as far as where they chose.

LaGuardia was 3.5 miles *behind* them. They'd have had to make *more
than* 180 degrees of turns to get realigned with the runway (think of
a lollipop) -- now you have to take that altitude loss into account,
as well as the distance around that lollipop; Without calculating it I
suspect you'll get somewhere between 5-7 miles total. And all of this
while running calculations and checklists that are designed to be
started at a much higher altitude (with more time to prepare).

The consequence of not making the runway on the first try would have
almost certainly been catastrophic to both the occupants of the plane
as well as those on the ground, and I believe they had to know that
the chance of success at that was low.

Landing in the river successfully was certainly not guaranteed, but I
believe gave them the best chance at both surviving themselves and
avoiding a catastrophe on the ground (not to be morbid, but at least
those on the plane voluntarily took on some risk, those on the ground
didn't).

I do think questions should focus around how *2* engines got taken out
at the same time; the whole concept behind twin operations is that the
plane can fly on 1 engine, and failure of even 1 is extremely rare.
This may be an amazing coincidence that will never happen again, but
we need to make sure there are no vulnerabilities in this particular
engine design etc.

Josh

In article ,
John Doe wrote:


The big question is whether it would have been operationally possible to
get the plane to do a 360 and head back to the runway it had taken off
from, and have airport clear the path in time for the plane to land
there without a collision with another aircraft. Remember that there
were likely other planes that had already taken off behind that US Air
one, so those would have had to veer off in the right direction to let
the US Air do its 360 turn.

Might have been substantially more than a 360. According to the
animation
I think he had already made a couple turns by the time he ate the birds.

Josh wrote:

The consequence of not making the runway on the first try would have
almost certainly been catastrophic to both the occupants of the plane
as well as those on the ground, and I believe they had to know that
the chance of success at that was low.

Looking at a map, there is plenty of water around LGA. The east river
does have some arms that provide landing oppportunities in various
directions.


If he had managed to line up to land on 13 (he took off from 31 which is
the same runway), there would have been a fair stretch of water before
reaching the runway treshhold (although the riker's island bridge might
be an obstacle).

Similarly, if he had made a right turn and circled back to align to
runway 22, there was plenty of ocean water ahead of the runway treshhold.

Hudson river probably provided a smoother surface to land on than ocean
water.

But I think the biggest driving factor may have been the fact that it is
easier to decide to aim at something that is ahead of you which you can
see and judge, rather than decide to turn around and aim for something
which is behind you and which you can't see. They couldn't get a "feel"
for how far LGA was since they couldn't see it.


Logic may have shown that they could have reached LGA, but the pilots
didn't have such information.

"Cyrus Afzali" wrote in message
...
I'm not sure you understood what I wrote.

No, looks like I was responding to the wrong person. My
apologies.

Bob M.

I love all these people without knowledge of the NYC metro area that
say he was SECONDS away from three airports. That's just patently not
true and THAT was what I was responding to. Add to that, Teterboro is
a corporate/general aviation airport; it was not built to accommodate
even short to medium-sized jetliners using

Teterboro has a 7,000 foot runway, the same length as the runways at
LGA. If the plane had been somewhat higher, it would have been a
reasonable place to land. The limit to GA is due to noise and local
opposition, not technical issues.

R's,
John

"John Levine" wrote in message
...
I love all these people without knowledge of the NYC metro area that
say he was SECONDS away from three airports. That's just patently not
true and THAT was what I was responding to. Add to that, Teterboro is
a corporate/general aviation airport; it was not built to accommodate
even short to medium-sized jetliners using

Teterboro has a 7,000 foot runway, the same length as the runways at
LGA. If the plane had been somewhat higher, it would have been a
reasonable place to land. The limit to GA is due to noise and local
opposition, not technical issues.

R's,
John

Let's just face it. The pilot had to make a quick decision. In this case,
he made the right choice. If someone had to do the same thing next week, it
may not turn out so good.